It is well documented that On Food and Cooking is an essential resource in any food-curious person’s kitchen. Harold McGee lays down facts in detailed explanations of scientific processes behind the foods we love, their history and a description of every form a particular food can possibly take. A fascinating amount of information. It is slightly less documented how incredibly poetic his exacting writing can be.
This excerpt from the first chapter, 61 pages on milk and dairy products, has always stood out as an example to me. Enjoy!
“The modern imagination holds a very different view of milk! Mass production turned it and its products from precious, marvelous resources into ordinary commodities, and medical science stigmatized them for their fat content. Fortunately a more balanced view of dietary fat is developing; and traditional versions of dairy foods survive. It’s still possible to savor the remarkable foods that millennia of human ingenuity have teased from milk. A sip of milk itself or a scoop of ice cream can be a Proustian draft of youth’s innocence and energy and possibility, while a morsel of fine cheese is a rich meditation on maturity, the fulfillment of possibility, the way of all flesh.”
–Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking
(Pictured above is the cheese plate that never saw 2013. If you think that looks bad, you should have seen the minibar.)
HAPPY AND HEALTHY REMAINING 11 MONTHS OF 2013, EVERYONE!
up chef creek 